Lately, the political Left, such as it is, has been devoting considerable space to a vexing dilemma: Why are we losing so badly and accepting defeat, despite every indication people should be fighting back? From the recent issue of Harper’s magazine to the leftist blog Alternet, it seems many on the Left can’t fathom the reasons for our collective acceptance of failure.
As the populations of Canada and the United States continue to be ruled by casino capitalism, wars without end, and widening economic gaps between rich and everyone else, some of the Left have begun asking why these conditions have not birthed significant forms of anti-authoritarian opposition, or whether such situations historically lead to dramatic social change.
Here at Dissident Voice, journalist Charles Davis’ recent piece on “The Limits of Liberalism” echoed a familiar sense in liberal and progressive quarters:
And that brings me to the recent primary elections, which I believe illustrate a point I have learned many times over since ‘06; namely, that electoral politics is at best a diversion, a tried-and-true means for the political establishment to channel public anger with the status quo in such a way that the status quo is never seriously threatened.
Davis’ realization happened in 2006, but anarchists have understood the malignant nature of states and representative politics for over a century. Davis, like many on the Left now emerging from the haze of corporate mass media indoctrination (especially in the form of the Obama Presidential campaign), provides advice for those looking to break free of statist politics:
Instead of banking on a politician improving our world, my advice? Improve yourself. Be an example to others. Work not on the behalf of a political party, but your community. Put simply, forget the polling booth and head to the soup kitchen. At least then you won’t be complicit in a bloodied, immoral system.
Why is such inspirational advice necessary at this moment? According to psychologist Bruce E. Levine, the Left needs morale-boosting not more information.
The barrage of recent leftist self-examinations began back in December with Levine’s “Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression.” The essay, which found some circulation online, asked some basic questions about traditional liberal assumptions about the power of information to enlighten and empower individuals:
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Levine compares the American public’s docility in the face of increasing tyranny to “abuse syndrome,” in which victims, afraid to leave the abusive relationship, are forced to endure more abuse. Offering such victims more information about the nature of their abusive relationship does not help them change their situation. Instead, argues Levine, the informational pile-on produces greater demoralization:
Perhaps the ‘political genius’ of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What people need are forms of morale boosting, he claims. The
April 2010 edition of Harper’s, the American liberal establishment magazine, contains a similar analysis, this time describing the state of being a subjugated American in terms of the CIA interrogation technique of “learned helplessness,” the application of random and repeated “no touch” torture such that prisoners simply give up.
Under the headline “The Vanishing Liberal,” author Kevin Baker writes:
We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.
Baker then explains how this fatalism is contrary to traditional American liberalism and its belief in “human agency.” Baker ends on a note as dramatic and fatalistic as he began:
There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.
Setting aside the laughable notion that the elites of America ever possessed some beneficent posture (part of an idealized liberal past, I suppose), the significance of Baker’s admissions and conclusions should not be overlooked: party politics in America is dead, and (in true anarchist fashion) “the work will have to be done from the ground up.
Italian Autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, in his book Precarious Rhapsody, provides another explanation for the existence of this Great Liberal Depression: the “psychopathogenic effects” of what he calls semio-capitalism, a “new regime” characterized by “the fusion of media and capital.” He writes:
Economic competition and digital intensification of informatic stimuli, combined together, induce a state of permanent electrocution that flows into a widespread pathology which manifests itself either in the panic syndrome or in attention disorders…. Depression descends on the cognitive worker because his or her own emotional, physical, intellectual system cannot indefinitely support the hyperactivity provoked by the market and by pharmaceuticals.
Berardi believes the new form of capitalism has produced “a psychopathic phenomenon of over-excitation, trembling, panic and finally of a depressive fall.” Berardi’s conclusions resemble Levine’s belief that the oppressed are overwhelmed by the new conditions of capital and media. Berardi writes quite explicitly, “The economic crisis depends for the most part on a circulation of sadness, depression, panic and demotivation.”
Is a moment like ours inevitable in the life of capitalism? “Is it ‘inevitable’ that capitalism will crash and produce the socialist-anarchist revolution?” asks Wayne Price in his March 2010 article for NEFAC. Price believes the current American Depression will continue and will worsen, along with environmental decay and state war-mongering. In response, he expects “an eventual new wave of popular radicalization, combining elements of the 30s and the 60s.”
According to Price, there are three basic narratives of how class struggle consciousness relates to capitalist crisis: the view that capitalism inevitably produces catastrophe and the working class response, or, as Marx and Engels wrote, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”; the view held by liberals, which argues capitalism is not governed by deterministic laws, and that electoral politics might produce socialism, that “revolution is not needed”; and finally, the view that capitalism tends toward catastrophe, and so revolution, though not inevitable, is necessary to avoid “ruin and destruction.”
Price concludes:
One of these choices (ruin/barbarism/annihilation) will be the outcome if capitalism is given its head…. The other (revolutionary social-anarchism) requires that the working class become aware of the danger, conscious of the possible alternative to disaster, and decides to take the choice of freedom, cooperation, radical democracy, ecological balance, and internationalism…. The issue will be decided in struggle.
Perhaps there is an opportunity for anarchists to intervene in these liberal moments of depression and anxiety? Perhaps anarchists can be the group to transform liberal hopelessness into anarchist class struggle? When liberals admit the only avenue toward freedom, from this dire moment in history, is “from the ground up” and it will “have to be done by us,” what they are really saying is, “Only anarchism makes sense now.”
The next step is to educate liberals and others dispossessed of the current corporate statist order on the benefits of anarchism. This education should begin by dispelling common misunderstandings of anarchism, such as the idea that anarchism is about nothing but spreading chaos. As Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt describe in their recent book Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, anarchism has an international legacy of mass class struggle movements. In addition, various strands of anarchism exist and have provided philosophical and tactical forms of resistance against racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.
Surprisingly, and perhaps indicative of the desperation of the current situation, the next step is something on which Charles Davis, Bruce Levine, Kevin Baker, and Wayne Price could all agree: begin building communities from the ground up.